Friday, November 28, 2014

All
humans were once hunter-gatherers. Back then, versatility came with the
territory. There were only so many game animals, and they differed a lot in
size, shape, and color. So you had to enjoy switching back and forth from one
target animal to another. And you had to enjoy moving from one place to another.
Sooner or later you'd have to.

Beginning
10,000 years ago, farmers made their appearance. Now monotony came with the
territory. A plot of land wasn't something you could forget while you took off
somewhere else. It needed constant care. The tasks were also more repetitive:
ploughing, sowing, harvesting ...

Things
worsened as farming became more advanced. You had to focus on one crop and a
limited number of key tasks.

Different
means of subsistence have selected for different mental traits, and this
selection has had genetic consequences. Monotony avoidance has a heritability
of 0.53 (Saudino, 1999). This predisposition has usually been a handicap in
modern societies, so much so that it often leads to criminality. Males with a
history of early criminal behavior tend to score high on monotony avoidance, as
well as on sensation seeking and low conformity (Klinteberg et al., 1992).

Today,
if you have trouble fitting into your society, you might still survive and
reproduce. In the past, you probably wouldn’t. Other people would take your
place in the gene pool and, over successive generations, their mental makeup would
become the norm.

That’s
gene-culture co-evolution. We have reshaped the world we live in, and this human-made
world has reshaped us. After describing how our ancestors radically changed
their environment, Razib goes on to write: "We were the authors of those
changes, but in the process of telling that story, we became protagonists
within it" (Khan, 2014).

China: a case
study

Advanced
farming—intensive land use, task specialization, monoculture—has profoundly shaped
East Asian societies, particularly China. This is particularly so for rice
farming. Because the paddies need standing water, rice farmers must work
collectively to build, dredge, and drain elaborate irrigation networks. Wheat
farming, by comparison, requires no irrigation and only half as much work.

Advanced
farming seems to have favored a special package of predispositions and
inclinations, including greater acceptance of monotony. This has been shown in
two recent studies.

The
first one was about boredom and how people experience it in their lives. The
results from the 775 Chinese participants were then compared with the results
from a previous survey of 572 Euro-Canadians. It was found that the Chinese
participants were less likely to feel bored in comparable situations. They
seemed to value low-arousal (calm, relaxation) versus high arousal (excitement,
elation) in the case of Euro-Canadians (Ng et al., 2014).

The
authors attributed their findings to cultural learning. One may wonder,
however, why preference for low arousal persists in the face of China’s massive
influx of high-arousal Western culture.

Relational thinking,
collectivism, and favoritism

The
second study had the aim of seeing whether the sociological differences between
rice farmers and wheat farmers have led to differences in mental makeup. When
1,162 Han Chinese performed a series of mental tasks, the results differed
according to whether the participants came from rice-farming regions or
wheat-farming regions (Talhelm et al., 2014).

When
shown a list of three items, such as “train”, “bus”, and “tracks”, and told to choose
two items that pair together, people from rice-farming regions tended to choose
"train and tracks," whereas people from wheat-farming regions tended
to choose "train and bus." The former seemed to be more relational in
their thinking and the latter more abstract. This pattern held up even in
neighboring counties along China's rice-wheat border. People from the rice side
of the border thought more relationally than did people from the wheat side.

A
second task required drawing pictures of yourself and your friends. In a prior
study, Americans drew themselves about 6 mm bigger than they drew their
friends, Europeans drew themselves 3.5 mm bigger, and Japanese drew themselves
slightly smaller. In the present study, people from rice regions were more
likely than people from wheat regions to draw themselves smaller than they drew
their friends. On average, people from wheat regions self-inflated 1.5 mm, and people
from rice regions self-deflated -0.03 mm.

A
third task required imagining yourself doing business with (i) an honest
friend, (ii) a dishonest friend, (iii) an honest stranger, and (iv) a dishonest
stranger. This person might lie, causing you to lose money. Or this person
might be honest, causing you to make money. You could reward or punish this
person accordingly. A previous study found that Singaporeans rewarded friends
much more than they punished them. Americans were much more likely to punish friends
for bad behavior. In this study, people from rice regions were more likely to
remain loyal to friends regardless.

Interestingly,
these findings came from people with no connection to farming at all. They grew
up in a modern urban society, and most were too young to have known the China
that existed before the economic reforms of the late 1970s.It looks like rice regions have favored hardwiring
of certain psychological traits: less abstract thinking and more relational
thinking, less individualism and more collectivism, and less impartiality
toward strangers and more favoritism toward kin and friends.

Why farming sucks,
for you but not for me

These
findings corroborate the ethnographic literature on the differences in
mentality between hunter-gatherers and farmers. Hunter-gatherers typically see
farming as a kind of slavery, and they have trouble understanding well-meaning
outsiders who want to turn them into land-slaves.

Yes,
for the same land area, farming can produce much more food. But it's hard work,
not only physically but mentally as well. Humans had to undergo a change in
mentality before they could make the transition from hunting and gathering to
farming

Those
humans ended up transforming not just their physical landscape but also their
social and cultural landscape … and ultimately themselves. By creating new values
and social relations, they changed the rules for survival and reproduction,
thereby changing the sort of mentality that future generations would inherit.

Humans
transformed the world through farming, and the world returned the favor.

References

Khan,
R. (2014). Our cats, ourselves, The New
York Times, The Opinion Pages, November 24

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Are
liberals and conservatives differently wired? It would seem so. When brain MRIs
were done on 90 young adults from University College London, it was found that
self-described liberals tended to have more grey matter in the anterior
cingulate cortex, whereas self-described conservatives tended to have a larger
right amygdala. These results were replicated in a second sample of young adults
(Kanai et al., 2011).

A
study on 82 young American adults came to a similar conclusion. Republicans
showed more activity in the right amygdala, and Democrats more activity in the
left insula. Unlike the English study, the anterior cingulate cortex didn't
differ between the two groups (Schreiber et al., 2013).

It
would seem, then, that conservatives and liberals are neurologically different.
Perhaps certain political beliefs will alter your mental makeup. Or perhaps
your mental makeup will lead you to certain political beliefs. But how can that
be when conservatism and liberalism have changed so much in recent times, not
only ideologically but also electorate-wise? A century ago, English
"conservatives" came from the upper class, the middle class, and
outlying rural areas. Today, Britain's leading "conservative" party,
the UKIP, is drawing more and more of its members from the urban working class—the
sort of folks who routinely voted Labour not so long ago. Similar changes have
taken place in the U.S. Until the 1950s, white southerners were overwhelmingly
Democrats. Now, they're overwhelmingly Republicans.

Of
course, the above studies are only a few years old. When we use terms like
"conservative" and "liberal" we refer to what they mean
today. Increasingly, both terms have an implicitly ethnic meaning. The UKIP is
becoming the native British party, in opposition to a growing Afro-Asian
population that votes en bloc for
Labour. Meanwhile, the Republicans are becoming the party of White Americans,
particularly old-stock ones, in opposition to a Democrat coalition of African,
Hispanic, and Asian Americans, plus a dwindling core of ethnic whites.

So
are these brain differences really ethnic differences? Neither study touches
the question. The English study assures us that the participants were
homogeneous:

We
deliberately used a homogenous sample of the UCL student population to minimize
differences in social and educational environment. The UK Higher Education
Statistics Agency reports that 21.1% of UCL students come from a working-class
background. This rate is relatively low compared to the national average of
34.8%. This suggests that the UCL students from which we recruited our
participants disproportionately have a middle-class to upper-class background.
(Kanai et al., 2011)

Yes,
the students were largely middle-class, but how did they break down ethnically?
Wikipedia provides a partial answer:

In
2013/14, 12,330 UCL students were from outside the UK (43% of the total number
of students in that year), of whom 5,504 were from Asia, 3,679 from the
European Union ex. the United Kingdom, 1,195 from North America, 516 from the
Middle East, 398 from Africa, 254 from Central and South America, and 166 from
Australasia (University College London, 2014)

These
figures were for citizenship only. We should remember that many of the UK
students would have been of non-European origin.

We
know more about the participants in the American study. They came from the
University of California, San Diego, whose student body at the time was 44%
Asian, 26% Caucasian, 10% Mexican American, 10% unknown, 4% Filipino, 3%
Latino/Other Spanish, and 2% African American (Anon, 2010). This ethnic
breakdown mirrors the party breakdown of the participants: 60 Democrats (72.5%)
and 22 Republicans (27.5%).

Affective empathy
and ethnicity

In
my last post, I cited a study showing that the amygdala is larger in
extraordinary altruists—people who have donated one of their kidneys to a
stranger. In that study, we were told that a larger amygdala is associated with
greater responsiveness to fearful facial expressions, i.e., a greater
willingness to help people in distress. Conversely, psychopaths have a smaller
amygdala and are less responsive to fearful faces (Marsh et al., 2014).

Hmm
... That's a tad different from the spin in Psychology
Today. Are liberals the ones who don't care about others? Are they ...
psychopaths?

It
would be more accurate to say that "liberals" come from populations
whose capacity for affective empathy is lower on average and who tend to view
any stranger as a potential enemy. That's most people in this world, and that's
how most of the world works. I suspect the greater ability to monitor
uncertainty and conflict reflects adaptation to an environment that has long
been socially fragmented into clans, castes, religions, etc. This may explain
why a larger anterior cingulate cortex correlated with "liberalism"
in the British study (high proportion of South Asian students) but not in the American
study (high proportion of East Asian students).

As
for "conservatives," they largely come from Northwest Europe, where a
greater capacity for affective empathy seems to reflect an environment of
relatively high individualism, relatively weak kinship, and relatively frequent
interactions with nonkin. This environment has prevailed west of the Hajnal
Line since at least the 12th century, as shown by the longstanding
characteristics of the Western European Marriage Pattern: late age of marriage
for both sexes; high rate of celibacy; strong tendency of children to form new
households; and high circulation of non-kin among families. This zone of weaker
kinship, with greater reliance on internal means of behavior control, may also
explain why Northwest Europeans are more predisposed to guilt than to shame,
whereas the reverse is generally the case elsewhere in the world (Frost, 2014).

All
of this may sound counterintuitive. Doesn't the political left currently stand
for autonomy theory and individualism? Doesn't it reject traditional values
like kinship? In theory it does. The reality is a bit different, though. When
Muslims vote Labour, it's not because they want gay marriage and teaching of
gender theory in the schools. They expect something else.

The
same goes for the political right. When former Labourites vote UKIP, it's not
because they want lower taxes for the rich and offshoring of manufacturing
jobs. They expect something else. Are they being delusional? Perhaps. But,
then, are the Muslims being delusional?

Perhaps
neither group is. Perhaps both understand what politics is really about.

In
a previous post, I discussed why the capacity for affective empathy varies not
only between individuals but also between populations. First, its heritability
is high: 68% (Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen, 2013). So natural selection has had
something to grab hold of. Second, its usefulness varies from one culture to
another. It matters less where kinship matters more, i.e., where people
interact mainly with close kin and where non-kin are likely to be enemies. The
threat of retaliation from kin is sufficient to ensure correct behavior.

Affective
empathy matters more where kinship matters less. This is a situation that
Northwest Europeans have long known. Historian Alan Macfarlane argues that
kinship has been weaker among the English—and individualism correspondingly
stronger—since at least the 12th century and perhaps since Anglo-Saxon times
(Macfarlane, 2012; Macfarlane, 1992, pp. 173-174). A weaker sense of kinship
seems to underlie the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP), as seen by its
defining characteristics: late age of marriage for both sexes; high rate of
celibacy; strong tendency of children to form new households; and high
circulation of non-kin among families. The WEMP has prevailed since at least
the 12th century west of the Hajnal Line, a line running approximately from
Trieste to St. Petersburg (Hallam, 1985; Seccombe, 1992, p. 94).

Can natural
selection specifically target affective empathy?

So
if affective empathy helps people to survive and reproduce, there will be more
and more of it in succeeding generations. If not, there will be less and less.

But
what exactly is being passed on or not passed on? A specific capacity? Or
something more general, like pro-social behavior? If it's too general, natural
selection could not easily make some populations more altruistic than others.
There would be too many nasty side-effects.

Although
pro-social behavior superficially looks like affective empathy, the underlying
mental processes are different. Pro-social behavior is a willingness to help
others through low-cost assistance: advice, conversation, a helping hand, etc.
The logic is simple: give some help now and perhaps you'll receive a lot later
from the grateful beneficiary. By the same logic, you may stop helping someone
who seldom reciprocates.

Affective
empathy is less conscious. It seems to have developed out of cognitive empathy:
the ability to simulate what is going on in other people's minds, but not
necessarily for the purpose of helping them. Con artists have plenty of
cognitive empathy. Empathy is affective when you not only simulate how other
people feel but also experience their feelings (Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen,2013). Their wellbeing comes to matter as much as your own.

Empathy
of either sort relies on unconscious mimicry: "empathic individuals
exhibit nonconscious mimicry of the postures, mannerisms, and facial
expressions of others (the chameleon
effect) to a greater extent than nonempathic individuals" (Carr et al., 2003). The ability to mimic is key to the empathic process of relaying
information from one brain area to another via "mirror neurons":

-
The superior temporal cortex codes an early visual description of another
person's action and sends this information to posterior parietal mirror
neurons.

-
The posterior parietal cortex codes the precise kinesthetic aspect of the
action and sends the information to inferior frontal mirror neurons.

-
The inferior frontal cortex codes the purpose of the action.

-
Parietal and frontal mirror areas send copies of motor plans back to the
superior temporal cortex in order to match the visual description of the
person's action to the predicted sensory consequences for that person.

-
The mental simulation is complete when the visual description has been matched
to the predicted sensory consequences (Carr et al., 2003).

By
simulating the sensory consequences of what someone does or intends to do, we
gain an understanding of that person that goes beyond what our senses
immediately tell us.

[...]
we understand the feelings of others via a mechanism of action representation
shaping emotional content, such that we ground our empathic resonance in the
experience of our acting body and the emotions associated with specific
movements. As Lipps noted, ''When I observe a circus performer on a hanging
wire, I feel I am inside him.'' To empathize, we need to invoke the
representation of the actions associated with the emotions we are witnessing.
(Carr et al., 2003)

Affective
empathy exists when this mental representation is fed into our own emotional
state. We feel what the other person feels and we act appropriately. This is
much more than pro-social behavior.

From psychopaths
to extraordinary altruists

The
capacity for affective empathy varies from one person to the next. It is least
developed in psychopaths:

Psychopathy
is a heritable developmental disorder characterized by an uncaring nature,
antisocial and aggressive behavior, and deficient prosocial emotions such as
empathy, guilt, and remorse. Psychopaths exhibit consistent patterns of
neuroanatomical and functional impairments, such as reductions in the volume of
the amygdala and in the responsiveness of this structure to fear-relevant
stimuli. These deficits may underlie the perceptual insensitivity to fearful
facial expressions and other fear-relevant stimuli observed in this population.
(Marsh et al., 2014)

Mainstream
opinion accepts that psychopaths are heritably different because they are
"sick." Heritable differences are thus thought to be unusual and even
pathological. "Normal" individuals may vary in their capacity for
affective empathy, but surely that sort of variability is due to their
environment, isn't it?

No
it isn't. That variability, too, is largely genetic. Affective empathy varies
over a largely heritable continuum, and an arbitrary line is all that separates
psychopaths from "normal" individuals. There may be many psychopaths
or there may be few; it depends on where you set the cut-off point.

At
the other end of this continuum is another interesting group: extraordinary
altruists. A research team has recently looked at the brains of such people,
specifically individuals who had donated one of their kidneys to a stranger:

Given
emerging consensus that psychopathy is a continuously distributed variable
within the general population and that psychopaths represent one extreme end of
a caring continuum, we hypothesized that extraordinary altruism may represent
the opposite end of this continuum and be supported by neural and cognitive
mechanisms that represent the inverse of psychopathy; in particular, increased
amygdala volume and responsiveness to fearful facial expressions. (Marsh etal., 2014)

In
extraordinary altruists, the right amygdala is larger and responds more to
fearful facial expressions. This is the inverse of what we see in psychopaths,
who have smaller amygdala and are less responsive to fearful facial
expressions.

Affective
empathy is thus a specific mental trait, like psychopathy. It is not a form of
pro-social behavior any more than psychopathy is a form of antisociality:

[...]
it is important to distinguish between antisociality that results from
psychopathy, which is specifically associated with reduced empathy and concern
for others, as well as with reduced sensitivity to others' fear and distress,
and antisociality that results from any of a variety of other factors, such as
impulsivity or trauma exposure, that are not closely related to empathy. (Marshet al., 2014)

Marsh
et al. (2014) cite a number of studies to show the relative independence of these
two behavioral axes: prosociality / antisociality and affective empathy /
psychopathy.

Conclusion

Affective
empathy is specific and largely heritable. People differ continuously in their
innate capacity for affective empathy, and it is only by setting an arbitrary
cut-off point that we classify some as "psychopaths" and others as
"normal," including extraordinary altruists who may be a small
minority.

Affective
empathy is an intricate adaptation that must have evolved for some reason.
Initially, it may have served to facilitate the relationship between a mother
and her children, this being perhaps why it is stronger in women than in men
(Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, 2004). In some cultures, natural selection may
have increased this capacity in both sexes and extended it to a wider range of
social interactions. This scenario would especially apply to Northwest
Europeans, who have long had relatively weak kinship. They have consequently
relied more on internal means of behavior control, like affective empathy
(Frost, 2014).

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Kostenki
Man, reconstructed by Mikhail Gerasimov (1907-1970). An early European who was
not yet phenotypically European.

Who
were the first Europeans? We now have a better idea, thanks to a new paper about
DNA from a man who lived some 38,700 to 36,200 years ago. His remains
were found at Kostenki, a well-known Upper Paleolithic site in central European
Russia (Seguin-Orlando et al., 2014).

Kostenki
Man tells us several things about the first Europeans and, more broadly, the
first non-African humans:

The Neanderthal
encounter

Modern
humans received their Neanderthal admixture when they were just spreading out
of Africa some 54,000 years ago. At that time, they had not yet encountered the
Neanderthals and were entering the territory of the Skhul/Qafzeh hominids, a
semi-archaic people of the Middle East. So we may have got our Neanderthal
admixture indirectly. The Skhul/Qafzeh hominids had probably interbred with
their Neanderthal neighbors to the north, and our ancestors may have then
picked up this admixture while in the Middle East.

When
our ancestors spread farther north into Europe, some 45,000 to 42,000 years
ago, they could have interbred directly with Neanderthals, but they didn't.
Perhaps the two groups were just too different. They seem to have intermixed
only via a third party that was neither fully modern nor fully archaic.

A strange detour
... and then another!

There
was initially a large continuous population across northern Eurasia, perhaps
composed of nomads who pursued wandering herds of reindeer across the European
Plain and its eastward extension into central and northern Asia.

Not
long before the time of Kostenki Man, these Northern Eurasians began to split
into three regional groups: Western Eurasians, Eastern Eurasians, and the
ancestors of Middle Eastern farmers. The degree of reproductive isolation is
unclear, however, and gene flow may have continued between all three groups
until the onset of the last ice age some 25,000 years ago. This may be why
Kostenki Man does not fit perfectly into any of the three groups, although he
is genetically closest to Western Eurasians.

Yes,
Northern Eurasians were ancestral to the early farming peoples of the Middle
East. It seems that early modern humans had to head north, learn to hunt reindeer,
and then head south again before they could start farming. Sounds like a
strange detour. Wouldn't it have been easier to stay put and do it locally? You
know, Middle-Eastern hunter-gatherers becoming Middle Eastern farmers?
Apparently not.

It
gets even more convoluted. After some of those Northern Eurasians had gone
south to the Middle East, some of their farming descendants
"returned" to Europe and partially replaced its hunter-gatherers,
particularly in southern and central Europe. This second detour has been
greeted with disbelief. Dienekes (2014), for instance, has written: "I
don't think many archaeologists would derive European farmers from Russia
(Russia is actually one of the last places in Europe that became
agricultural)."

True,
but farming requires a mindset that may have come from those northern hunters
(Frost, 2014). When Piffer (2013) looked at human variation in alleles at COMT, a gene linked to executive
function, working memory, and intelligence, he found that northern hunting
peoples had more in common with farming peoples than with other
hunter-gatherers, "possibly due to the higher pressure on technological
skills and planning abilities posed by the adverse climatic conditions."

That
mindset made farming possible, but the first steps toward farming could not be
taken in a cold climate. They had to be taken in a place with a long growing
season and a wide variety of domesticable plants and animals, such as in the
Middle East. Once farming had developed there, it could move back north, while
taking along its technologies, its food crops, and its livestock species.

Farming
can develop in the tropics with a "tropical" mindset, but it looks
very different. The farming that arose in West Africa is overwhelmingly women's
work and seems to have wholly developed out of female plant gathering. The
guinea fowl is the only animal that has been domesticated for food consumption
in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Ice Age was
not so bad

The
Upper Paleolithic humans of northern and eastern Europe did not die out during
the last ice age, as was commonly thought. They survived the glacial maximum
intact.

The European
phenotype came later

Kostenki
Man was dark-skinned, dark-eyed, and rather short. These details, curiously
enough, appear not in the paper but in a review of the paper, published by the
same journal, as well as in an interview with one of the authors (Associated Press, 2014; Gibbons, 2014).

So
we now have an upper bound for the emergence of the European phenotype, i.e.,
light skin and a diverse palette of hair and eye colors. The lower bound has
been set by the remains of a Swedish hunter-gatherer, dated to 8,000 years ago,
who had the "European" allele for light skin at the gene SLC24A5 (Skoglund et al., 2014).

Conclusion

My
main criticism centers on the dating to 38,700 - 36,200 years ago. At the
Kostenki site, the radiocarbon dating used to be some 10,000 years younger. It
was then recalibrated to an older range of dates when a layer of volcanic ash
at the site was attributed to a volcano that had erupted in southern Italy some
39,000 years ago. This recalibration was initially controversial, but the
controversy has since subsided (Sinitsyn and Hoffecker, 2006). I would not rule
out a subsequent re-recalibration.

By
retrieving ancient DNA from an early modern human, we have made a key advance
in human paleogenetics, perhaps more so than by sequencing the Neanderthal
genome. We again see that evolution did not slow down with the emergence of
anatomically and behaviorally modern humans some 60,000 years ago. It actually
began to speed up, as humans began to enter not only new natural environments
but also new cultural environments of their own making.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Throughout
the world, kinship used to define the limits of morality. The less related you
were to someone, the less moral you had to be with him or her. We see this in
the Ten Commandments. The phrase "against thy neighbor" qualifies the
commandment against bearing false witness and, implicitly, the preceding ones
against killing, adultery, and stealing. For the modern reader, "thy
neighbor" is helpfully explained as meaning "the children of thy
people" (Leviticus 19:18).

In
some cases, this kin-based morality gradually ceased to apply the farther away
one went from home and from immediate kith and kin. Usually, however, the
limits of one's moral community coincided with some kind of boundary: a
geographic barrier, a political border, and/or an ethnic frontier. Beyond lay
the world of "strangers."

Toward a universal
morality

The
first efforts to universalize morality—to create a single moral system that
could apply to everyone—"arose simultaneously around 500 BCE in various
parts of the world, from China in the Far East to Southern Italy in the
West" (Assmann and Conrad, 2010, p. 121). These efforts were initially
driven by the need to form alliances between different peoples:

Alliance
- the formation of treaties - proved the most important instrument of
internationalism. Forming an alliance required mutual recognition of the
deities which served as patrons. The treaties which these empires formed with
each other and with their vassals had to be sealed by solemn oaths invoking the
gods of both parties. The list of these gods conventionally closes the treaty
[...]. They had to be equal in their function and rank. Intercultural theology
became a concern of international law. (Assmann and Conrad, 2010, p. 125)

As
ancient empires expanded and absorbed different peoples, this intercultural
theology became useful for internal peace, notably with the
Hellenistic empires that arose in the wake of Alexander the Great's conquests.
By affirming that different religions are interchangeable, it became possible
to create a common civic culture for diverse peoples:

Hellenization
had two faces. On the one hand, it referred to the diffusion of Greek language,
ideas and customs all over the Ancient World; on the other hand, it appeared to
be more of a construction of a 'common culture', suggesting a similar change in
Greece as in the other cultures. Flavius Josephus did not speak of 'Greek' but
of 'common culture', ho koinos bios,
as the goal of Jewish assimilation or reform in the Hellenistic age. (Assmann and Conrad, 2010, p. 127)

One
result would be the emergence of a universal religion. We like to associate
this development with the teachings of Jesus, but a kind of proto-Christianity
was already emerging near the end of the pre-Christian era.At that time, many Jews were adapting their
belief in one God to the universal worldview of Hellenistic culture:

Thus,
while biblical universalism was founded on a notion of the mission of Israel to
save all of humanity and bring them to the true worship of the only God,
Hellenistic notions of universalism involved the assumption that all the gods
were really different names for one God. (Boyarin, 1994, chap. 3).

The
two belief-systems merged among the increasingly Hellenized Jews of the eastern
Mediterranean, thus setting the stage for Jesus and making it easier for his
movement to succeed.

The Christian
impulse

This
new religion became a vehicle not only for moral universalism but also for
belief in human equality. For if morality is universal, all humans must have
the same capacity to follow its rules. In Christ, asserted Paul, there is
neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female (Galatians 3:28).

While
Christianity would steer people in the direction of universalism, there were
limits to how far it could go. Theologians sometimes spoke of the need to set
lower aims for average people and higher aims for saintly men and women. We see
this realism in Augustine's position on prostitution: "If you do away with
harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust" (De Ordine ii, 4). The same could be said for the Church's position
on war, slavery, prejudice, and other manifestations of human inequality. These
were the realities of an imperfect world.

Such
imperfections nonetheless became harder to accept over the following centuries.
First, there was "mission creep." Once the Church had established
certain ideals, there was continual pressure to bring human behavior into line
with them. Second, the geocenter of the Church was shifting away from the
eastern Mediterranean, where the absolute morality of Christianity had been
constrained by the relative morality of kinship. Farther north and west, beyond
the Hajnal Line, kinship ties were weaker and people more receptive to
universal principles. There was thus a "fruitful encounter" between
the Christian faith and these northwest Europeans who were more willing to
internalize such principles and apply them more thoroughly (Frost, 2014a).

Within
this region, Catholicism would radicalize to the point of splitting away and
becoming Protestantism. Here, too, Christian ideals would increasingly be taken
to their logical conclusion.

The Abolitionist
movement

Abolitionism
began in the 17th century among English Quakers as a movement to abolish the
slave trade. Over time, it grew more radical, seeking not only to free black
slaves but also to extirpate racial and ethnic prejudice. Although
"antiracism" did not yet exist as a word, its form and substance were
already recognizable by the early 19th century. This was particularly so in the
American northeast, where radical abolitionists denounced not only slavery but
also fellow abolitionists who wanted to settle freed slaves in Africa. "In
the 1830s, for the first time in American history an articulate and significant
minority of Americans embraced racial equality as both a concept and a
commitment" (Goodman, 1998, p. 1). This militant minority wanted more than
simply an end to slavery:

Believing
that racial prejudice underpinned slavery, abolitionists committed themselves
not just to emancipation [...] "Our prejudice against the blacks is
founded in sheer pride; and it originates in the circumstance that people of
their color, only, are universally allowed to be slaves," Child argued.
"We made slavery, and slavery makes the prejudice." Color phobia,
abolitionists contended, is irrational, wicked, preposterous, and unmanly. It
is contrary to natural rights and Christian teaching, which recognizes no
distinctions based on color. Race prejudice, Elizur Wright Jr. exploded, is
"a narrow, bitter, selfish, swinish absurdity." (Goodman, 1998, p.58)

Decline ... and
resurgence

That
first wave of antiracism subsided in the late 19th century, partly because of
the rise of Social Darwinism and partly because of disillusionment with the
Civil War's aftermath. Radical abolitionists had long set their sights on
ending slavery and crushing the American South, yet achievement of both goals
failed to bring the final goal of human equality any closer. In the face of
growing self-doubt, they lacked the ideological stamina to keep the faith and
push forward, come what may. The movement thus fell into decline, remaining dominant
only in the American northeast.

This
first wave did not die, however. It was resuscitated in the early 1930s and
would give rise to a much more dynamic second wave. The rise of Nazism
convinced many Jewish intellectuals, notably the anthropologist Franz Boas, of
the need to fight "racism" in all its forms, this word being
initially a synonym for Nazism (Frost, 2014b). The war on racism would outlive
the defeat of Nazi Germany, as a result of continuing fears of anti-Semitism in
the postwar era. Moreover, it had now taken on a life of its own, much like its
19th-century predecessor.

Today,
some eighty years later, that war is still being fought. What began as a
reaction to Nazism has become a permanent cultural revolution.

Welcome to my blog! For the most part, this page will be an extension of my website, with comments relating to my research. But it will also branch out into more general discussions of human evolution.